


Three Part Harmony

by kusuriurikun



Series: Shibuya Continuum [11]
Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Car Accidents, Double Entendre, Experimental Style, Gen, Interviews, Retrospective, Rock Stars, and technically Erasure in 777's case, live fast die young rock hard, readers are forewarned I let characters say "fuck", what with literally being Reapers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29851950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kusuriurikun/pseuds/kusuriurikun
Summary: Live fast, die young, rock hard.A little tale of a dead band made of dead kids that played music to wake the dead, told by the two who lived to tell the story after the Long Game.Note: This is actually in a rather experimental format of essentially being an interview.(CW: Vague (and dismissed) double entendres, car/van accidents, the normal stuff you'd expect in a rockumentary.)
Relationships: 777 & BJ & Tenho (TWEWY)
Series: Shibuya Continuum [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1902298
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Three Part Harmony

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LightningClawedSky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightningClawedSky/gifts).



Transcription from _Wake the Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Def Märch_ (2007, Backstreet Productions). "RD" here is "Reaper Dan" who produced said biography. Transcriber's notes in italics.

* * *

RD: So, how did you all get your stage names?

Tenho: I actually never took a stage name to begin with, and BJ…

RD: Can we print this?

Tenho: Oh it’s not _that *laughs*_

BJ: Bartles and Jaymes, yo! _*laughs*_

RD: He got his stage name off wine coolers?

BJ: Yeah. So. This was after one of our first gigs at this hole-in-the-wall in Udagawa that hasn’t been there in...like..decades? So we’re getting drinks, and Tenho’s ordering shochu, and Sev’s got a beer, and I order one of those Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers…

Tenho: And we proceed to give him shit about it the next three nights, “BJ Kenichi”, and this eventually shortens to “BJ”...

BJ: And so I kept it because it was hilarious as fuck, everyone thought it was “BJ” for, you know... and we got people coming in thinking it was a hair metal act and got their faces melted off * _laughs*_

RD: And Sev?

Tenho: Yeah, he actually gave thought into it * _laughs*_ He’d mentioned “you know how the devil is 666, right? Well, we’re gonna be badass enough we top the devil, so what’s bigger than six? Seven, right?” So 777.

BJ: ...God, but I miss Sev.

Tenho: We all miss Sev.

* * *

RD: So tell us about the backstory of your theming…

Tenho: So, in our early days…

RD: Before the accident?

Tenho: Yeah, before the accident...we’d got enough money to get a van together, not even a proper tour bus, but we were gonna start touring, do some touring even outside Shibuya, even outside Tokyo, maybe do some dates in Kyoto or Nagasaki...but we didn’t really have a theme then, we were just punk gutter kids doing music..

Tenho: But yeah, we actually were really pumped, we actually had managed to snag our first touring gig as an opener at A-East...

BJ: So pretty much after the gig, we’re all exhausted, we’re more than a little drunk celebrating, and so we crash out in the van...and, well, apparently black mini transport vans show up for shit at night in an alley because the actual headliners backed into our van…

Tenho: Yeah, fucked BJ up pretty good in front, fuckin’ _destroyed_ Sev and me tho…

 _(At this point in the video interview, you see Reaper Dan smile and nod. If one has the sight to see it...maybe if one saw the Weebers, or you tuned the tracking head to JUST where it’d gotten static...one might see Harrier’s wings.)_

Tenho: It took a while to get used to being dead, we eventually did the Reaper Thing because we knew only one of us would make it back, and we kept up on BJ best we could…

BJ: Yeah, I was in hospital for a good month, and my legs were still a mess afterwards, and to be honest I didn’t know what to do with myself...sometimes it was like I’d see the guys again, well, now I know I WAS seeing them, but at the time I thought I was literally going bugfuck nuts. Thought about even confessing about it to Futoshi ( _stage director for DM_ ) but figured I’d end up put away if I ever did…

Tenho: We’d have times where he “crank called” and we answered before he joined up again.

BJ: Yeah, I took up Reaper Creeper as a recreational hobby, like, at night I’d be like “Reaper Creeper, are Sev and Tenho ok wherever?” And I’d always get back “Yes” but...yeah, I kinda was convinced I was losing it...so about six months after the Accident, I took a swan-dive in front of a city bus...and woke up in the Square, and later on met up with Sev and Tenho and practically jumped at becoming a Reaper, so...

_(At this point, those who are unfamiliar with the UG are probably thinking “this is really impressive how none of them are breaking kayfabe. Ghost-circa-2016 levels of Not Undoing The Mask.)_

_(It’s probably better for the mundanes.)_

RD: And shortly after that is when you reformed Def Märch?

Tenho: Yeah.

BJ: So we got back together, and after a while, Sev had the idea of starting up the band again…

Tenho: Yeah. We’d figured out as Reapers you could still walk around and be seen in the RG, and so one night Sev is like “why not restart the band, but play with the dead thing?” 

BJ: It actually made sense, you had visual kei bands playing around with the gothic dead theming, so…

Tenho: ...and Sev was like “we’ll do punk gothic” _*laughs*._ We actually came up with themes…

RD: Seriously?

BJ: Yeah, at the beginning we were actually talking about buying an actual hearse and touring in the hearse and having Sev come out in a coffin on stage, till Tenho pointed out we still had day jobs _*laughs*_

Tenho: Yeah, I had to be That Guy and point that out...pity, the hearse would have been epic _*laughs*_ But we did end up getting the mike and the stage setup, and Futoshi actually does deserve a hell of a lot of credit for getting things going :D

BJ: Yeah, he recorded _Live from the Underground_ , which was our one live, we pretty much decided from there we’d do all our recording raw as hell, but it was Futoshi’s idea of doing a promo live.

* * *

RD: I remember you guys talking about the Pranking War at some point...

BJ: _*laughs*_

Tenho: Oh god… _*cowers laughing*_ Yes, that actually was a thing. More with Sev, but...yeah.

BJ: So...Sev had essentially a friendly rivalry with one of the Harriers that ended up becoming a GM…

Tenho: Yeah, Minamimoto. Apparently Sev and the Grim Heaper had known each other before death, and had some friendly arguments about music and math rock in particular…

BJ: And after they both died apparently they kept on with this and it ended up descending into a pranking war _*laughs*_ Like...there was the time we were doing a gig and had glitter dumped on us on stage...took it forever for Sev to get it out of his hair...

Tenho: There was the time Minamimoto swapped our stage outfits with Lapin Angelique bunny-girl maid suits…

BJ: I still have not figured out how he got our sizes _*laughs*_ Futoshi still swears innocence…

Tenho: I actually heard he made it a Reaper Mission to get our clothing sizes for one day, and to buy the bunny maid outfits and swap them out the next…

BJ: We eventually found the clothes in a dumpster, and 777’s pants on a flagpole _*laughs*_

Tenho: And then Sev decided there would be Revenge, and proceeded to have us all hit the Shibu-Q Heads at 10am the next day...and you know the giant fucking garbage heaps Minamimoto would do?

RD: The ones that looked like a tower made out of a junkyard? Oh, I’ve heard about those…

Tenho: The very ones...well...Sev basically has us go into the Shibu-Q Heads and buy as much pink paint as we could get…

BJ: It wasn’t much as we were poor, but… _*laughs*_

Tenho: So it’s day 7 of the last game before the Long Game, Minamimoto had fucked off to Pork City as Minamimoto was wont to do...and so Sev literally climbs up Trash Mountain and dumps the two cans of hot pink RIGHT where the Grim Heaper would usually sit…

BJ: You could hear the screaming for KILOMETERS when he saw it _*laughs*_

Tenho: And then he got us back by stealing our Reaper Mike and putting it in the _middle_ of his next heap…

BJ: But we got his megaphone! _*laughs*_

Tenho: Man, I miss that shit…

* * *

Tenho: Then again, the Long Game...oh lord… _*sighs*_ Lots of shit’s been different since the Long Game.

RD: I’ve heard about that, but don’t remember it…supposedly huge conflict, everything went crazy, that's when we lost Sev...

BJ: Yeah.

Tenho: ...yeah, I have to remind myself there’s been kids who’ve ended up in the UG since the Long Game.

BJ: The Long Game was such a clusterfuck.

Tenho: The _mother_ -clusterfuck, to be truthful.

RD: It’s where…

BJ: Yeah.

Tenho: We lost a lot of good people, Sev among them. It still fuckin’ hurts.

BJ: It was really the third week in that time where it went to hell.

Tenho: Like...there’d been rumors even the second week that things had gone odd, like rumors of Noise going after Reapers…

RD: The Taboo Noise outbreak. I’ve heard about it, but nobody really will talk about it…

BJ: Nobody’ll talk about it because it was like shit from a _horror_ film, yo.

Tenho: Yeah, it was bad though the third week of the Long Game, though. Like...you’d hear someone got Erased just about every day, you hoped you lived through it, yanno? Though that actually wasn’t the worst of it…

BJ: Sev apparently ran into Minamimoto. After...well, there’d been rumors he’d somehow brought himself back from Erasure, and...yeah, apparently he was _all_ fucked up, and Sev was pretty fucked up about it…

Tenho: Yeah. He was dead serious, told us to stay away, said he’d somehow come back _wrong_. And then the next day…

BJ: ...yeah.

Tenho: All I’ll say...is fuck the Long Game, and fuck the third week of that Long Game in particular.

* * *

RD: So, have you guys thought about a reunion?

BJ: Nope.

Tenho: _*long silence*_ We...don’t really talk about it, and we’ve never considered gettin’ a new lead singer, yanno? We were a band, we played as a band, but...Sev was the soul of the band, you know? I fuckin’ miss him…

BJ: Yeah.

Tenho: Like...I know there _are_ folks with good chops--like a lot of folks don’t know Kariya ( _Koki Kariya, a familiar face around A-East in our Views from the Scene later…_ ) is actually a hell of a guitarist in his own right...we’ve done some occasional jams, even...but if we reformed a band without Sev, it’d just not be Def Märch, you know? It’d be its own creation. 

BJ: There’d be a different soul to it. A different _vibe_. And honestly the vibe here’s changed…

Tenho: Yeah, I’m not sure it’d even work 100% now.

RD: Which is why you were reluctant to release _Beyond the Grave: The Final Def Märch._

Tenho: Yeah. We actually released that out of respect for Sev, it was compiled from our final sessions we’d done before everything went to hell, and even the last session where I swear the very light system was against us *laughs*

BJ: Yeah, like we ended up blowing the main circuit, and I think everyplace in Tokyo was out of stage fuses…

Tenho: Oh god, Futoshi was cursing us a blue streak by the end *laughs* But we finally got back on, but that frustration...that ended up being one of the rawest and angriest and most fun sets we’ve done or EVER done. And I think Sev would be glad that the last thing we ever recorded as a band was that gig to remember us by.

BJ: Wherever he is, I’d like to think he would have liked this as his last hurrah.

Tenho: Like...I can see me doing music again, BJ might, hell, Futoshi’s gotten interest in starting his own band...if we do another band, it’s not gonna be Def Märch 2.0, it’s going to have its own magic in the end. Def Märch was the three of us as a band, and there was a certain magic in that. I’m just glad we could share some of the last good moments.

RD: Thanks so much for your time.

**Author's Note:**

> ...When I had the initial concept of this fic, I was originally planning on it being a linear story, but somewhere along the way it turned into an Irish wake for 777 as recorded in the pages of some 90’s rock mag--something like _Kerrang!_ or _Hit Parader_ or _SPIN_ or _Rolling Stone_ or half a dozen free and quarter-priced local scene mags printed on newsprint or even printed out at a local copy shop that were pretty much a Thing anywhere a music scene existed…
> 
> Yeah, nowadays, bands do this sort of stuff through Youtube vids and Reddit AMAs and their own Twitch streams and the like, but there’s still kind of a magic to me in interviews in old scene mags, and one that’s kind of lost now (save maybe in live Twitch chats). 2007-2008, though, you still had scene mags and the equivalents (though the old printing-at-the-local-copy-shop had by that point become “run your own local mailinglist and web board and Myspace”. 
> 
> And again, it’s not what I intended at first...but it fits, somehow. A dead interview format for a dead band full of dead kids in what in 2007 was considered a dead genre of music talking about their deader-than-dead bandmate and a dead era (aimed at other dead kids)... _works_.
> 
> Dedicated to LightningClawedSky, who’s done some damn fine ShoSev work and whom we bounced concepts off of in the writing of this (and who caught the unintentional intentional Hollywood Undead ref :3).


End file.
